“I Started at the Top…”

"...and I’ve been working my way down ever since."

I’m gonna say it. Just come right out there and say it. The opening shot of Touch of Evil is overrated. Technically impressive, artistically forgettable. There. I said it. And I have never been able to appreciate the rest of the film because Charlton Heston as a Mexican is so ludicrous (and massively offensive) in so many dimensions – especially given Heston’s latter-day real-life gun toting – that I can’t begin to comprehend how anyone made such a casting blunder, even in the studio days.

But enough of that…

There’s no doubting that when within the first decade of time in features you write/direct/act in such cinematic genius as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger and The Lady From Shanghai, you are among the all time greats.

But where do you go from there?

Well, you voice the nefarious intelligent planet-eating cyber planet Unicron in the 80’s animation genius that was the Tranformers Movie. Few cinemaphiles would many reviewers would acknowledge the merit in this kind of role – especially for a giant of the medium like Welles. But not only is the film one of the truly brilliant of it’s genre, Welles lends a chilling menace and moral ambiguity to his part that confirms his versatility and downright genius.

And a decade earlier, in some of the most bruising and intriguing autobiographical moments ever committed to film, he made the obscure classic F For Fake.

Beginning ostensibly as a biopic of the great 60’s art faker Elmir de Hory, the film moves on to chronicle the rise and fall of fraudulent biographer Clifford Irving and the ‘art’ of the fake in general. Implicit along the way is Welles’ fascination with trickery, which blows out in the latter parts of the film to a categorical questioning of his own career and his part in peddling illusion.
The brilliance in the crafting of the film and the heartfelt immediacy of Orson’s confessions cannot be overstated. For this film jockey, F For Fake heralds the legendary status of the big O more than any other film. See it (and the Transformers Movie too, naturally…).